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World Digital Library Reaches Milestone as 10,000 Items Now Accessible

03.05.2014

The World Digital Library (WDL), a collaborative international project and Carnegie Corporation grantee led by the Library of Congress, now includes more than 10,000 manuscripts, maps and atlases, books, prints and photographs, films, sound recordings, and other cultural treasures. The 10,000-item milestone was reached this week with the addition of a set of priceless manuscripts from the Walters Art Museum of Baltimore, a WDL partner since 2010.

Other items recently added to the WDL include block-print books from the Song Dynasty in China, Islamic manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish, early 20th-century historical documents from the archives of the League of Nations, and codices that once belonged to the legendary library of King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. With the latest additions, the WDL includes 10,037 rare and unique items, comprising nearly 500,000 images. Content contributed by 102 institutions in 46 countries is on the WDL site, which can be accessed in seven languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Walters Art Museum continues to digitize its world-class manuscript collection. The Walters collection can also be directly accessed on the museum’s website, www.thewalters.org, and at www.thedigitalwalters.org.

Proposed by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and launched in 2009, the World Digital Library makes significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world freely available on www.wdl.org. The principal financial supporters of the WDL are Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Qatar National Library of the Qatar Foundation, and the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress.

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